Listen to this article. [3:26]
A few months later, one afternoon near supper, I was slicing onions with it when I cut off the tip of my index finger. It happened faster than I imagined was possible. At first, there was no pain; then a geyser of bright red blood spurted out over the rings of pearly onions splayed there on the cutting board. My eyes had teared up from the onions. My vision was blurred as if from a torrential rain. I could hardly see. Maybe that’s why the knife slipped. My finger stung and throbbed. I couldn’t tell how badly it was cut. I grabbed some paper towels, wrapped my finger in them, squeezed to staunch the bleeding. Blood kept soaking through. It dripped in front of me as I rushed outside, my hands held high as if in supplication.
This happened in the final year of our marriage, in our suburban home, a ranch in a subdivision built upon what had once been fields of sweet corn. It was summer and the light was very bright even for that time of day. My legs wobbled. On the curb, at the end of the driveway, my daughter and her friend were selling pipe-cleaner bracelets from a plastic Ariel table. My son, just out of diapers, was driving his little red sit-on tractor up and down the driveway. We’d attached a red wagon to it, which that day was filled with my old clothes—high heels, an old prom gown, flowered sundresses, purses, and straw hats. They used these things for playing dress-up. Sleeves and hems dragged along our driveway made of gray concrete mixed with variegated pebbles, and was cracked in places from winter snows and ice.
What will happen to my children? I wondered as blood drenched the paper towels. It flowed and flowed, apparently never to stop. I swallowed the howl that swelled inside of me. But my children were safe; I could see them, there, in the sunlight, playing in the driveway. I unwrapped my finger. The flap of skin on its tip opened like a mouth. Blood pulsed out of it.
My husband rushed home to take me to the emergency room. A neighbor watched our kids. My fingertip survived, even though my marriage didn’t. A thin pearly scar, curved like a tiny half-moon, marks where it was stitched back on.
“Why,” my husband asked me after we got home, my finger wrapped like a small mummy, and it would stay that way for the many weeks of healing. "Why were you using the new bread knife on an onion?”
I didn’t have an answer.
Wendy Swift’s husband was incarcerated in the 1990s, leaving her alone to support her three young daughters as they navigated loss, shame, and uncertainty. The path was uneven and hard-won. It required resilience, reflection, and growth from all of them, just as it revealed all too starkly the perils of blind materialism.
This powerful memoir illuminates the complex challenges families face when confronted with addiction, mental illness, and incarceration. A Dream Life ultimately affirms that anyone can unknowingly fall prey to false beliefs, but once the truth is revealed and the fear of dislocation and upheaval is faced and overcome, renewal and strength will take their place.
Available from Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and an independent bookseller near you.
Julia MacDonnell published Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother’s Story of Reunion and Reckoning, her first nonfiction book, in September 2024. She has also published the 2021 story collection, The Topography of Hidden Stories. Her second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last!, was published by Picador in 2014. Her first, A Year of Favor, was published in 1994 by William Morrow & Co.
Cynthia Storrs writes poetry and paints near Nashville. She undertook painting six years ago at the insistence of her high school students, after years of incorporating art history into her literature classes. She was smitten and only regrets she didn’t start painting last century. Her paintings have appeared on two book covers and have been selected twice to be reproduced as art banners in her village. Visit her at